Fig. 1

The history of Erasmus program from 1987 to 2018. The evolution of the Erasmus program is represented in terms of countries and students on mobility only for study reasons. The red line represents the number of mobile university students (left scale), the blue line represents the number of female university students on mobility only for the years in which the information is available (left scale), the yellow line represents the number of countries participating in the mobility (right scale). The grey vertical lines indicate the adhesion of new countries to the Erasmus program and the transformation of the program into Erasmus+. The green vertical lines identify some enlargements of the EU. Note that the value for the year 2014 is not an ex post figure, but a projection (European Commission 2015). Data on the number of participating countries and students are extracted from the Erasmus annual reports (European Commission 2000); information on female participants can only be derived for the period 2008–2013 and the year 2015